Envisioning robot workers

01 Overview

Adaptable robot workers for manual production tasks that no one wants to do?
Robot workers hired through staffing agencies?
A radical solution for a brave new world?

Kolektor Digital took on the challenge. Drawing on their in-depth experience of advanced robotics and visual technologies, they needed a 3D machine vision camera with human-like capability. Zivid Two provided the performance required.

02 Background

Expert in both advanced visual technologies and advanced industrial robotics, Kolektor Digital is a leading provider of solutions for the smart factories in Industry 4.0. Based in Slovenia, the company combines 60 years of industrial manufacturing expertise with cutting-edge digital technologies to create smart factory solutions for the future.

As an early adopter and proactive exponent of machine vision in product quality control systems, Kolektor Digital quickly adapted the technology and applied it to much broader scenarios; in process management, identification, and dimensional measurement applications.

The company has continued to break new ground in visual technologies. Today it is recognized for rapid advances in artificial intelligence, visualization, augmented reality, and virtual reality systems. Its work is often regarded as pioneering and disruptive, in all the most positive of senses.

Being at the forefront of vital industry megatrends, Kolektor Digital became a strong advocate of the democratization of advanced machine vision and robotics. For small and medium-sized businesses and large corporate enterprises, it means lowering the barriers to entry.

In 2018 Kolektor Digital instigated a radical new development program entitled, ‘KoCo Robot Worker’. Its goal would be to produce an adaptable robot capable of detecting its surroundings, manipulating products or trays, activating machines, changing tools, and simplifying visual inspection.

Supported by a team of 50 experts in artificial intelligence and robotics, the KoCo robot worker project laid the foundation for a forward-thinking business model. The purpose; changing the traditional CapEx model in manufacturing to a more agile OpEx model, which lowers the entry barrier for automation. This is achieved by establishing staffing agencies for flexible robots, hiring robot workers to users to help them achieve greater quality, productivity, and reduced labor costs.

03 Challenges

At the heart of the KoCo robot worker project lay a real-world need to create an autonomous robot solution that was highly reliable and adaptable in nature. It had to be capable of tackling a multitude of tasks and in a broad range of industrial sectors and applications.

Kolektor Digital customers had long reported increasing difficulty recruiting and retaining sufficient personnel to handle the more monotonous, repetitive, and strenuous production tasks. The KoCo robot worker would therefore address this trend by taking over such tasks.

Robert Bevec, Head of KoCo Development said, “To produce what is an almost universal autonomous robot, able to handle all manner of different low-skilled tasks, flexibility was a paramount design criteria. KoCo would need to be very easy to reconfigure and able to adapt to completely new workplace settings and duties.”

To arrive at such an ideal demanded a core machine vision system capable of delivering significantly elevated levels of data capture, irrespective of the target scene content. It had to identify and inspect objects of almost any material - metal, plastic, or rubber for example, shiny or matt, light or dark.

Both 2D and 3D image-capture had then to be far more detailed and faster than previously experienced. Only then could the necessary data-rich machine-learning be achieved and the derived intelligence shared across an established network of KoCo robot workers.

And while the choice of robot arm and tooling was largely incidental to the project specification, KoCo needed to maximize portability and payload handling. It had to be easy to deploy and handle as wide a range of objects as possible.

Jure Skrabar, Senior Researcher of Optical Metrology at Kolektor Digital said, “Because we wanted to offer customers a fully-integrated, out-of-the-box robot worker, our aim was always to mount the machine vision camera on the robot arm. This of course had implications for the choice of camera. Too heavy and it would limit gripper payload. We had to maximize payload and reach.”

And as with any industrial robot project, maintaining personnel safety in the workplace was a further crucial consideration. The KoCo robot can be configured to a range of applications, from collaborative, cooperative to fenced-in, depending on the required duty cycle. Using its modular approach, the robot can be reconfigured for the required workplace while assuring safety by monitoring the status of safety modules and adapting the speed of operation.